“Barbara—she’s Barbara—she went back to the dock because her shorts were close to the edge and she could get her phone, and I went up to wait for the police. Our friends swam over to try to help, but . . .”
“It was too late,” Barbara said.
“She fell onto those rocks. No one would survive that.”
“Was there anyone else up there?” Stevie said.
“You mean, did someone push her?” Barbara said. “Oh god. No. There was no one. We would have seen. We could see her clearly. There was no one up there but her. She was screaming. She must have tripped.”
“She must have tripped,” the woman who was not Barbara repeated sadly.
Stevie decided not to press Barbara and not-Barbara any further. They were upset, and they had conveyed what they had witnessed—a woman screaming and tumbling off a rocky point.
Not a woman. Allison Abbott. The librarian, the archivist of her sister’s life. The runner. The person who had been through so much, who loved her sister so fiercely.
Stevie felt nauseous and turned back into the woods, walking the way she had come, taking big gulps of soft pine-scented air, trying to let the curtain of greens and browns and pinpoint sunlight soothe her.
Screaming. Tumbling. Her brain, fueled by thousands of hours of absorbing true and fictional crime, painted the scene in vivid detail.
Then the rush came—the flush of anxiety and panic, the one that made the trees loom and the ground sinister. The one that twisted the morning into something that mocked her and separated her from all that was familiar.
“No,” she said out loud, stopping. She closed her eyes and practiced her breathing, in slowly, holding, releasing
even slower. Breathe. Exhale. She let the world wobble and fall away for a moment.
When she opened her eyes again, all had not been fixed in its entirety, but things were a bit more stable. And she was going somewhere that would help. She tramped on, passing several camping areas, until she finally saw some tents she recognized, and beyond them, the red one she was looking for. She jogged up to it, then wasn’t sure what to do for a moment. You can’t knock on a tent.
“Hey,” she said, her voice coming out rushed. “Hey?”
There was a stirring within.
“Stevie?” said a sleepy voice.
A shuffling. Then the zipper opened itself from the inside and a tousled-haired David in a T-shirt and shorts peered out. He smiled, but this faded when he saw her face.
“What’s wrong?”
Stevie sat down in one of the portable camping chairs outside the tent and stared at the ground for a moment.
“Allison Abbott is dead.”
“Allison . . . Abbott?” he said, ducking to get out of the tent. “Who is Allison Abbott?”
“Sabrina’s sister. The librarian. She fell off the point at the top of the lake. Arrowhead Point.”
“Oh shit,” he said, rubbing at his jaw, taking this in. He didn’t know Allison or Arrowhead Point, but he knew Stevie, and he knew pain and confusion. He looked around for a moment, then opened a cooler and pulled out a can of coffee.
“You want this?” he said, offering her the can.
Stevie took it. He dragged over another folding chair and sat close to her.
“You okay?” he asked. He was asking that a lot now.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“Neither do I, but I have no idea what’s going on.”
She had explained some of the case to him, but not every detail of what she had done here. The cool parts, of course, like busting Carson and things like that, but not what it felt like to be in Allison’s house, surrounded by Sabrina’s things. Not the feeling of being able to give Allison something her sister had made, however minor.